Review - McCorkle mixes pathos, comedy with seniors

Sunday

Mar 31, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Jill McCorkle is one of North Carolina's most beloved authors and a master of the modern American short story

By Ben SteelmanBen.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com

Jill McCorkle, one of North Carolina's most beloved authors and a master of the modern American short story, turns in her first novel in 17 years with "Life After Life." And like a lot of authors these days – one thinks of Clyde Edgerton's "Lunch at the Piccadilly" – she sets it in a nursing home.Once again, McCorkle, a Lumberton native, returns to her fictional Tar Heel town of Fulton. We have references to Ferris Beach, her fictional Brunswick County beach town, featured in an earlier novel, and even Johnnie Mercer's Pier at Wrightsville Beach. (A true Tar Heel, the author knows it's spelled J-o-h-n-n-i-e.)Her primary setting is the Pine Haven Retirement Facility, an assisted-living center with a nursing wing. Not surprisingly, pathos mixes with comedy.One by one, we meet the residents and their frequent visitors, and like the characters in Edgar Lee Masters' "Spoon River Anthology," they mostly narrate their own stories.Miss Sadie, the 85-year-old former teacher, taught most of Fulton's residents in elementary school and knows many of their secrets. She embraces a philosophy of looking on the bright side of life (without the black-comic irony of the Monty Python song) and helps residents improve on their memories by "photo-shopping" Polaroids of dream vacations they never took.Stanley Stone, once the most prominent lawyer in town, is faking senility – posing as a foul-mouthed professional wrestling fan with no sense of propriety – so he can avoid living with his grown son.Rachel, a retired Bostonian, moved south so she could live in the hometown of the man of her dreams, with whom she had a torrid affair in the 1970s. He's dead now, and she walks over to the local cemetery to visit him (and his wife, buried by his side).There's Toby Tyler, a retired gym teacher who renamed herself after the little boy who ran away with the circus, and Marge Walker, a mixture of the Church Lady and Miss Grundy.And there's Harley, the resident nursing home cat. Ever since that book "Making Rounds With Oscar," most of the residents assume Harley comes into their rooms because he thinks they're about to die – so poor Harley gets a lot of screams and shoes thrown in his direction.Pine Haven's real angel of death, however, is Joanna, once the much-married "Liz Taylor of Fulton." (Her checkered marital career is much exaggerated by local gossip.) Now she's the hospice volunteer, the one who's always by the bedsides of the dying, the one who records their last words in a secret, private journal.(In addition to excerpts from that journal, we also have italicized monologues which seem to be the residents' last thoughts or visions. One lady revisits cocktail hour in New York's old Tavern On the Green; a fly fisherman lands a big one; a Greatest Generation veteran relives the Battle of the Bulge.)In the meantime, plenty happens: a golden-age romance, several deaths, including one homicide. Abby, the 12-year-old who visits Miss Sadie almost daily to escape an unhappy home, loses her beloved dog Dollbaby. (The story is, it ran away, but we soon suspect Abby's social-climbing mother had something to do with it. The poor little pooch wet her gorgeous Persian rugs one time too often.) C.J., Pine Haven's pierced-and-tattooed beautician, finds romance, perhaps.All of this gives McCorkle an opportunity to meditate (indirectly, without preaching) on death, old age, the relations between parents and children and the ultimate point of life. Despite a few misfires – Abby's mother turns into a one-dimensional villain – the result is McCorkle's most mature and most satisfying fiction to date. While the subject might seem depressing, "Life After Life" should leave most readers with a smile and an indefinable sense of uplift.